This invention relates to egg trays and particularly to an egg incubating tray which provides for a maximum amount of egg cells in a tray, the rack for positioning a plurality of intermeshed trays in the incubator, and a slide for facilitating the disposition of such trays in the rack.
In the art of egg incubation the principal desire has been to provide incubation equipment that will result in the maximum amount of hatched eggs, that is, the least amount of eggs that break during incubation and also tha maximum amount of eggs that can be positioned in the incubator. There have been many attempts to place more and more eggs in the incubator and at the same time prevent the breakage of eggs during incubation. In the usual situation, each rack in an incubator holds three identical trays. The rack is approximately 36 by 12 inches and each of the trays is about 12 by 12 inches. The desire is for each of the trays to hold as many eggs as possible. The usual egg tray, as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,147,738 to Thelig, can hold only 36 ordinary sized eggs in a square grid pattern. This square grid pattern is extremely limiting since three of these trays can only hold 108 eggs.
Another egg tray which increased the number of eggs in each tray is the tray disclosed in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 3,817,215. The tray of this patent has a diagonal pattern of egg cells, with the parallel rows being perpendicular to the straight edges of the tray (as shown in FIGS. 2 and 3). This increased the amount of eggs in each tray to 48. However, it still resulted in lost space. The space at the end of each row (designated 44, 46, 48 and 50 in FIG. 2 of the patent) is not used. Similarly, the space around vertical struts 52 is also not used. When three of these trays are positioned together, as shown in FIG. 5 of the patent, even though they can hold 144 eggs, the lost space is still not utilized. Therefore, the egg trays shown in the patent substantially increased the number of eggs that could be held on a rack, but still did not make use of some space that was available.
Further, the tray of U.S. Pat. No. 3,147,738 can only hold 36 ordinary sized chicken eggs and cannot hold large chicken eggs or turkey eggs. If the same arrangement were used for these larger eggs, far less than 36 eggs could be placed in a tray.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide egg trays having sufficient egg cells to receive a larger number of eggs per tray in no more space than the present egg trays.